Can the woman who helped make Cheryl Cole a star persuade Britain to accept Queen Camilla?

Following inauspicious beginnings, Camilla has become an accomplished player for Team Windsor

The Duchess of Cornwall was on her very best form this week. Chatty, self-deprecating, jokey, she dropped in on a group of amateur artists and confessed that her attempts at painting usually ended up in the bin.

Camilla’s visit ‘created a nice buzz’ according to one present — as, indeed, all her public appearances tend to do these days.

There is an ease and grace to her dealings with the public which nearly nine years of marriage have refined. Following inauspicious beginnings she’s become an accomplished player for Team Windsor.

Some engagements she finds more nerve-racking than others, but this week Camilla was on safe ground. The arts centre she visited at Corsham, Wiltshire, is a stone’s throw from Middlewick House, the mansion she occupied when she was married to Andrew Parker Bowles.

However, this visit also highlighted just how little the public is seeing of its future Queen Consort. In the three months since she and Charles attended the Commonwealth Heads of Government summit in Sri Lanka in November, her duties have been — let’s be charitable — light.

According to the Court Circular issued by Buckingham Palace, she has undertaken only 14 engagements, most of them centred on the royal palaces, with no lengthy travel from Clarence House involved.

The furthest afield she went was on a solo day-trip to Bulford Camp in Wiltshire (83 miles) and St Leonards-on-Sea in Sussex (65 miles). On two other occasions she visited Essex — once with the Queen and once with Prince Charles.

But whether small and intimate cocktail parties at Clarence House, which appear to be her main contribution to the royal roster, are the way to reach out to the wider British public remains very much in question.

And here we come to the heart of what may be called the Camilla Conundrum — is she doing so little because people don’t want to see her? Or is it because she’s disinclined to go out and meet them? And if so, why?

Back in September and October her workload was even lighter, with one Scottish engagement (while on holiday north of the border), two outings in London — to the Man Booker Prize and British Food Fortnight — a concert at Marlborough College in Wiltshire, and a visit to the Poppy Factory in the London suburb of Richmond.

On other occasions, the Duchess ‘received’ such diverse characters as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Colonel of the Intelligence Corps, and the obscure Princess Laurentien of the Netherlands — all at Clarence House, her home.

Royal visit: The Duchess of Cornwell is pictured leaving the Royal Festival Hall in London during a trip this week

Joyful: Camilla smiles as she leaves the Festival Hall, left, before bending down to speak to a small child, right

Nothing is ever publicly noted of these events; beyond the royal circle no one knows quite what their purpose is, and what exactly is achieved, by offering these people a cup of tea.

A month ago, opinion pollsters YouGov released their latest findings on the Royal Family.

Prince Charles came out particularly well — a majority seemed to support the notion that he could now take over as Regent to allow the Queen a well-deserved retirement, while 53 per cent wanted him to be the next monarch, against 31 per cent who wanted the Crown to skip a generation and Prince William to be king.

Three-quarters of those polled wanted him to take on more of the Queen’s duties.

Support: A majority of people sem to support the notion that Prince Charles could now take over as Regent to allow the Queen a retirement

Charles’s visit to the Somerset Levels triggered the hasty arrival of both the Prime Minister and the head of the Environment Agency, Lord Smith — both of whom took his wake-up call and tried to make capital out of the royal initiative.

People instinctively knew who cared most for the flooded-out populace. But Camilla? Lost in the detail of the YouGov poll was a single damning statistic.

It showed that a mere 17 per cent of the population want her to be Queen. A striking 27 per cent want her to have no title at all when Charles ascends the Throne.

For Prince Charles, more so than for Camilla, this is little short of catastrophic. In the eight years before their marriage, and in the nine years since, the Duchess of Cornwall has made little headway in the crucial issue of whether she should sit beside Charles as his Queen when he is crowned King.

He wants it, but apparently the British people don’t.

Seventeen years to achieve a mere 17 per cent acceptance must be considered a failure, and this is perhaps why, having packed off key staff to Buckingham Palace, Charles has appointed a new team to overcome the Camilla Conundrum.

Kristina Kyriacou was recently appointed communications secretary to Charles and Camilla. She and her staff will, crucially, remain behind at Clarence House where they can be on call night and day.

Ms Kyriacou, who is 48 and single, is a powerful and gifted communicator with a showbiz background.

Her clients have included Gary Barlow, George Michael and Cheryl Cole. It’s a shrewd choice, and encouraging to see that our future king can think imaginatively when it comes to protecting and enhancing his reputation, for no old-school courtier would have the slightest clue how to tackle the Camilla question.

Reception: Charles has appointed a new team to overcome the Camilla Conundrum, including Ms Kyriacou, who was recently appointed his communications secretary. Above, the couple at an official reception last year

Does Kristina? ‘I’d say the biggest story she ever had to handle was the break-up of Take That,’ says someone who knows her. ‘This was serious news in 1996. She was the press officer for record label RCA, and when asked to comment on the break-up, she said: “At the moment there’s no truth that Take That have split”.

‘She chose her words carefully because technically, at that moment, it was true. It was the following day that the announcement was made.’

Take That’s Gary Barlow hired her as his manager, but even her consummate skills could not abate the public anger at the break-up and he was dropped by his record label.

She then went to work for Comic Relief as communications director. ‘She proved adept at getting maximum “warm” coverage for a bunch of tired old comedians traipsing round Africa,’ I’m told by one cynic.

Famous clients: Ms Kyriacou's clients have included singers Gary Barlow (pictured), and George Michael

‘She helped Gary organise a climb up Mount Kilimanjaro, which is where she met Cheryl Cole. She encouraged Cheryl to form her own charitable foundation for disadvantaged children in the north-east of England, and Cheryl met Prince Charles through Kristina.

'She’s good at putting the royals nex

t to top showbiz people. It’s as a result of her that Gary Barlow was given the job of organising the hugely successful Diamond Jubilee concert in the Mall for the Queen in 2012.’

So, skills in organisation, news management and promotion are what Ms Kyriacou brings to the party — and she’ll need them all.

On a windy day in February 2008 I stood on the pavement outside the public library in Winchester, Hampshire, awaiting the arrival of Camilla — who was due to open an extension to the building.

I was there because, as her first biographer, I was interested to see how she’d adjusted to a life of public duty since her marriage three years before.

Inside the building waited a clutch of the county’s great and good ready to applaud and bestow the customary bouquet. Outside — I saw virtually nobody. Despite extensive publicity ahead of the event, less than half a dozen citizens turned out to see her.

Is the problem that HRH is nervous of accepting invitations because she is fearful of facing indifference? Or does she face indifference because she doesn’t perform enough engagements to establish herself in people’s affections?

As any seasoned politician will tell you, pressing the flesh never does any harm, even on windswept streets in mid-February. Word of mouth spreads and — hopefully — trust and support follow.

In the years before the royal marriage in 2005, there was an exercise called the Camilla Campaign, a subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) strategy to make Camilla acceptable enough to marry the future king.

The Campaign employed a number of techniques, not all of them creditable to those involved.

Camilla would be wheeled out at set-piece events, kept at arm’s length from the public and photographed, then mothballed again. Thus her picture was in the newspapers but no one ever got to meet her.

The same strategy, pretty much, prevails today. It’s not the number of engagements Camilla undertakes that is the problem (though it would do no harm to up her batting rate) it’s the number of people she meets.

And judging by YouGov’s dismal poll findings, she just isn’t getting out enough. Performing a sterling service to the nation by supporting the Prince of Wales simply isn’t enough to secure the massive hike in public acceptance she needs to achieve in order to stand by Charles’s side on his Coronation Day.

No one knows this better than Camilla. But it’s no fun setting yourself up for a fall by making public appearances to which the populace remains largely indifferent, and it will take all the energy, enthusiasm, and guile of Take That’s former PR girl, to help her make the breakthrough.

Christopher Wilson is the author of A Greater Love — Charles And Camilla.

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Can the woman who helped make Cheryl Cole a star persuade Britain to accept Queen Camilla?